Transmission: Gary Simmonds and Dale Holmes – Tuesday 05 March 2019
Painting as a dialogue. Painting as a message. Painting as an exchange.
Gary Simmonds and Dale Holmes started a conversation through painting ten years ago. The modes of address have changed, morphed, abstracted, reconfigured, and made new to fit the need to carry on communicating. They have used the languages of painting—from abstraction and formalism to figuration and narrative and most things in between—as the subject and the material of this conversation. Recently this conversation has been mainly through the LCD screens of smart phones.
The paintings as uneven material things becoming images that are cropped, filtered, brightened by the backlight of the screen. The paintings (no longer paintings) are now apprehended through a mediated visibility, at once constrained and expanded through the technological infrastructure of contemporary communication.
They exchange images of paintings: some of theirs made in their studios, sometimes images of paintings made by others, often made now and sometimes made in the past in order to approach paintings to be made in the future.
Gary Simmonds is an artist and Fine Art Course Leader at Sheffield Hallam University. His practice is concerned with the space between abstract painting, design, and ornamentation. He makes paintings that flirt with formal abstraction, beauty, decoration, and disorder. He has exhibited work both nationally and internationally, including solo shows at One in the Other, London, De March and Solbiati, Milan.
Dale Holmes is an artist and Senior lecturer at the University of Huddersfield, His work is situated at the intersections of painting, performance, and sculpture, with the social and spatial relations of the domestic space, infrastructure, temporary architectures, and ad-hoc structures. Recently he has been exploring the potential of long distance endurance cycling as an accelerated psycho-geography, using the work and biography of Carl Einstein as a map. His project The Graveside Orations of Carl Einstein will be published by MA BIBLIOTHEQUE in 2019 with related events in Huddersfield, Berlin, and London.
Transmission: Gary Simmonds and Dale Holmes
Tuesday 05 March, 4.30PM – 6.00PM
Pennine Lecture Theatre, Owen Building
Sheffield Hallam University, City Campus S1 2LW
Please register on Eventbrite.
Transmission is an annual series of lectures and symposia, now in its seventeenth year, and is a collaboration between Fine Art, the Art & Design Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University, and Site Gallery. Convened by Sharon Kivland in 2001, Transmission was developed collaboratively with Lesley Sanderson from 2001 to 2004, and with Jasper Joseph-Lester from 2004 to 2012. The series is now convened by Sharon Kivland, TC McCormack, Hester Reeve, and Julie Westerman, in association with Site Gallery, Sheffield. The lecture series has an annual theme, and involves students from Fine Art, from undergraduates to PhDs.
Transmission is the passing of information via a channel, and this is the intention of the Transmission project. We enquire about the aesthetic and discursive forms required by practices in the field of contemporary art and theory that address sociality and subjectivity. It has encompassed a lecture programme, seminar discussions, an annual symposium, a print portfolio, four series of books: Transmission Annual, The Rules of Engagement, Transmission chapbooks, and five volumes of discussions/interviews, entitled Transmission: Speaking and Listening. These are published by Artwords Press, London.
Site Gallery is Sheffield’s international contemporary art space, specialising in moving image, new media, and performance. Pioneering emerging art practices and ideas, Site works in partnership with local, regional, and international collaborators to nurture artistic talent and support the development of contemporary art. At the heart of what Site does is the connection of people to artists and to art, inspiring new thinking and debate through its public programmes and participatory activity. Through diverse programming, Site reveals the process of making art to invite its audience to engage, explore, and connect. In 2018 Site Gallery re-opened after a building programme which trebled the scale of its public area.